Yeats worried that his poetry might be destroyed if he wandered too far
down what he called the hodos chameliontos, the chameleon road, in which the
imagination became so replete, overstimulated, that it kept producing images in such
profusion that the images became unintelligible. In a number of passages deleted
from his plays, we can see Yeats experimenting with these wild profusions of
images. In the art historical writings he studied, Yeats found visual analogues to the
hodos chameliontos in the world of Persian art.